A conservative think tank loves to say that Texas’ spending has been profligate for a decade, even under Republican rule.

Three speakers saluted the notion at a conference sponsored by the Texas Public Policy Foundation on Thursday.

But then things got interesting when the token liberal on the panel, budget analyst Eva DeLuna Castro of the center-left group the Center for Public Policy Priorities, started reminding people of recent history.

It turns out that the next big thing many staunch conservatives are clamoring for, a tighter constitutional cap on growth in state spending, has been Texas’ practice, if not its law, for the past decade, provided one lays aside the school property tax cuts the Legislature passed in 2006, DeLuna Castro said.

It’s only by ignoring those tax-rate reductions, which the state bought down with state money, that groups such as the foundation can produce scary numbers showing a 63-percent increase in state all funds spending since 2004, she said.

The background: For years, Gov. Rick Perry and various fiscal hawk groups have said that the Texas Constitution should be amended to impose a tighter spending cap on lawmakers. Since the late 1970s, the Constitution has said spending of non-dedicated tax revenues can’t grow faster than the state economy. By statute, the measuring stick is personal income growth.

That’s generally a looser constraint than the alternative pressed by staunch conservatives — a sum of the rate of household inflation and the percentage growth in state population.

In June, to much fanfare, the Texas Public Policy Foundation released a document called “The Real Texas Budget.”

It said that between September 2003 and next August, Texas will have managed to spend $1 trillion, if federal funds are counted.

“Spending in Texas during this period not only increased in absolute numbers, but also increased when taking into account population and inflation,” it said. “The total population/inflation adjusted increase in biennial spending since [fiscal] 2004 is $16.3 billion. This means that an average family of four pays $1,200 a year to support the growth of Texas government since 2004.”

Talmadge Heflin, director of the foundation's Center for Fiscal Policy

Former state Rep. Talmadge Heflin, the foundation’s fiscal policy chief, made a big deal of that $1,200 per household figure. He said if spending growth had been limited to population growth and inflation since the 2003 session, which was his last as a lawmaker, then the current two-year budget would be $186 billion instead of $202 billion.

DeLuna Castro, though, noted that the 2006 decision to reduce school property-tax rates by one-third added $7 billion a year to state spending. When fully phased in two years later, the state population was 24.3 million — meaning the tax cut added $287 a person to state spending, she said. If you run $287 in 2008 through the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI Calculator — click here and play with it; it’s fun — you get a current price tag for the tax cut of $317.30 per Texan per year.

“That’s the $1,200 increase that you see,” she said, referring to Heflin’s average family of four.

“Think about it as, you’re paying that much more through the state budget so your local property taxes can be lowered by that amount,” she said.

Protesters led by local activist Jaime Martinez, center, march Monday in front of the San Antonio hotel where House Speaker John Boehner was speaking. They were protesting for immigration reform and against deportations.

WASHINGTON – Some conservative and tea party activists ramped up pressure Wednesday for Congress to act quickly on immigration policy.

But pushback from other tea party elements was swift, and resistance remains.

In Texas, Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson joined business and faith leaders in calling for House Republicans to set aside ideological objections, and embrace an overhaul of immigration policy.

“We have some people who are just catatonic in their opposition,” he said. “I guess you could call them nativist. They’re not going to get it and no matter how much you talk to them they keep coming back to some bumper sticker cliché – `well, I’m against amnesty.’ My response is well, I am too.”

The biggest impediment to action in the U.S. House, in his view, “is just frankly having the guts to do what they know should be done.”

What exactly that is remains a subject of heated debate. President Barack Obama has renewed a push for immigration reform. But he’s remained adamant this week that any overhaul must include an eventual path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million people in the country illegally.

President Obama after speaking with law enforcement leaders about immigration reform on Tuesday.

That’s a nonstarter for many conservatives.

Bill Hammond, president of the Texas Association of Business and longtime advocate of updating the nation’s immigration’s policies, reiterated complaints about shortages of high skilled workers, and labor for the agriculture, hospitality and construction industries.

“Home construction is booming. A year ago it took 4 months to build a house in Dallas. Now it takes 6 months , because there are not enough sheet-rockers, framers etc.,” Hammond said.

The fresh Texas-based push was coordinated with a similar effort at the national level led by, among others, anti-tax activists Grover Norquist.

One national tea party leader made waves Wednesday by calling for an immigration overhaul that includes legal status.

Sal Russo, a co-founder of Tea Party Express, explained his views in an essay in Roll Call, a newspaper aimed at a capital audience, and on a call with reporters soon after the Patterson-Hammond call.

“There are too many bad ideas on immigration reform that too many conservatives have become satisfied with just saying no,” Russo said. “But I think we can do better than that by advancing our own conservative ideas for immigration reform.”

Norquist, one of the most high-profile and influential conservatives to back the bipartisan immigration bill the Senate approved last year — over the objections of Texas Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz – joined Russo Wednesday in demanding action from the GOP-led House, where the issue has stalled.

Norquist cited findings from a survey issued by an alliance of pro-immigration conservatives, showing that tea party-minded voters strongly favor action this year on immigration reform. The survey also found that three-fourths of such voters support legal status or even eventual citizenship for people in the country illegally, Norquist noted –glossing over a finding that one-in-four support deportation, instead.

Steve Case, a former AOL chairman, echoed a warning Obama issued a day earlier: Unless the House acts by August, immigration reform likely will go nowhere for another two or three years.

Speaker John Boehner has ridiculed some House Republicans for blocking progress, though he also has blamed inaction in the House on mistrust of Obama over enforcement of immigration laws.

Al Cardenas, president of the American Conservative Union, predicted the House will end up moving ahead soon on immigration reform, but without offering any path to citizenship.

The push from the right was by no means unanimous.

Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, issued a terse statement Wednesday afternoon making clear that she isn’t on board with Russo, Norquist and their allies.

“We must first fully secure our borders. Immigration reform cannot happen without this necessary first step,” she said, adding, “There is already a legal path to citizenship for those wishing to come to the United States. Anyone who decides to get off that path and enter the United States illegally should not be given any sort of amnesty.”

In Texas, Patterson echoed that, even as he called for action.

“At some point in the future when tempers subside a little bit, we can talk about a path to citizenship,” he said. For now, he said, “let’s get something done.”

WASHINGTON – Before the shutdown, before, during and after last week’s run-up to the shutdown, Texas Sen. John Cornyn argued that it was a really bad idea to threaten a shutdown. Linking defunding of Obamacare to ongoing operations of the federal government, whose budget expired at midnight Monday, he said, would be big risk – both to the economy and to the Republican Party which, Cornyn said, would surely get stuck with most of the blame.

Now that the shutdown is underway, focus has shifted to damage control. On the policy side, that would mean ending the shutdown by cutting some sort of budget deal. On the political side, that means finger pointing – a very popular activity in Washington.

“I and others have tried to forcefully make the case that it isn’t the House that’s being unreasonable here, since they continue to send over good faith proposals for breaking the impasse, or at least for mitigating some of the inconvenience and hardship,” Cornyn said this afternoon when asked if the reality of the shutdown has made him reassess his pre-shutdown anxieties. But the president has rejected those out of hand.

“There will be blame enough for everybody involved.… I would hope that at this point we wouldn’t be primarily focused on gaining political advantage by lengthening the shutdown and by maximizing the pain on the American people caused by the failure to pass a continuing resolution.”

On the Democratic side, lots of folks are blaming Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas’ junior senator, for rousing the rabble enough to force this showdown. But Cruz is taking fire from conservatives, too, and perhaps none so scathing as comments today from Grover Norquist.

“Because we started with the Cruz approach this got to the shutdown,” Norquist said. “Cruz said he would deliver the votes and he didn’t deliver any Democratic votes. He pushed House Republicans into traffic and wandered away.”

Who knew? Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist is a champion of immigration reform. Norquist told immigration advocates in Austin that just because you’re conservative doesn’t mean you are anti-immigrant. As we reported this morning, Norquist told a coalition of religious, business and law enforcement leaders that nobody doubts Texas’ conservative bona fides. So he said Texas ought to be leading the way in pressing Congress and the White House to reform the nation’s broken immigration system, including establishing a path to legal status for the 12 million undocumented people in the country.

“Texas is a voice on making sure the center-right movement — conservatives, Republicans, Americans — are seen properly on this issue. We’re getting past this sense that conservatives are supposed to be anti-immigrant.”

Norquist is the small-government guy who gets candidates to sign a no-new-taxes pledge — and holds their feet to the fire if they wiggle about it later. He’s famously known for saying he’d like to winnow government down to a size you can drown it in a bathtub. But on immigration, he’s among Republicans who realize the party has alienated Hispanics and needs to do a better job to attract a growing voter constituency – or risk decades in the political wilderness. He also represents business interests – one part of a coalition of business, law enforcement and religious leaders backing immigration reform.

Joining Norquist in Austin on Wednesday was Suzii Paynter of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, which advocates for the poor. With Norquist advocating cutting government spending and Paynter for helping for the most vulnerable, it was a rare pairing. But Payner explained that while business has its reasons to back immigration reform, many religious leaders people have their reason. It’s biblical, she said. After all, Paynter explained, the Bible’s replete with stories of immigrants in need. “Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden,” she said, adding that Moses was set adrift as a baby in a boat that found its way into an alien land. “And Jesus was a celestial immigrant from heaven.”

President Obama speaks with Gene Sperling, Director of the National Economic Council, in the Oval Office after passage late Tuesday of the fiscal cliff deal. He then flew to Hawaii to resume his vacation.

WASHINGTON – All but four Texas Republicans in the U.S. House voted against the deal that ended the fiscal cliff showdown late Tuesday, despite support from top GOP leaders.

“I voted against a bad bill that raises taxes on families and small businesses,” said Rep. Sam Johnson of Plano, a senior tax writer and one of 18 Texas Republicans who opposed the package. “I never have, and never will, support legislation that digs deeper into the pockets of hard-working taxpayers of the 3rd district to foot the bill for Washington’s spending,”

The four supporters, including Dallas Rep. Pete Sessions, a member of the GOP leadership as the incoming Rules Committee chairman, are allies of House Speaker John Boehner, though three other chairmen in the new Congress that convenes Thursday voted against the Speaker and the deal.

Sessions said he was “pleased to join my colleagues from both sides of the aisle to make critical parts of our tax code permanent…. This urgent action on the fiscal cliff tax provisions is simply the first battle, and we must now work to reduce government spending.”

Another chairman from Dallas, Rep. Jeb Hensarling – until a few weeks ago the No. 4 GOP leader and incoming chairman of Financial Services – said he couldn’t support a deal that failed to cut spending.

“I respect those of my Republican colleagues who reluctantly supported the bill in order to stave off further tax increases and economic harm. There were no good options to be had,” Hensarling said after the vote. “Massive tax increases were built into current law and despite our attempts, Republicans could not avert them with a president who was unwilling to work with us in a meaningful way.”

Passage in the GOP-controlled House hinged on Democratic support. The vote, near midnight, was 257 to 167, with only 85 Republicans agreeing to send the measure to President Barack Obama for signature. The No. 2 House Republican, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, voted against the deal. Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, the party’s 2012 nominee for vice president, voted yes.

In the Senate 21 hours earlier, Texas Republicans John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison voted for the measure, which sailed through the upper chamber late New Year’s Eve on an 89-8 vote. Ted Cruz, who replaces Hutchison on Thursday, made clear he would have joined other tea partiers in voting no. “Sadly, the Senate began 2013 by passing $620 billion in new taxes and just $15 billion in spending ‘cuts’ mere minutes after the bill was drafted,” he posted on Facebook late Tuesday.

The deal allows income taxes on some Americans to rise for the first time in two decades. In that sense, anyone who supported the package could be tarred for voting for a tax hike. But lower, Bush-era rates expired on New Year’s Eve, and a vote late Jan. 1 to restore lower rates won the blessing of anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist – a key point to Republicans who backed the deal.

But most of the Texas GOP contingent in the House – the biggest from any state, and overwhelmingly conservative – resisted.

“I cannot support legislation that increases taxes $41 for every dollar of cuts,” Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, the incoming Homeland Security chairman, said after the vote. “This bill only serves to bring more money into the Treasury. It completely avoids dealing with the spending problem, which is the root of our country’s economic crisis.”

One Texas Republican missed the vote: Rep. Ron Paul, who is retiring. His son, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., was one of several tea partiers who opposed the deal in the Senate. All nine Texas Democrats in the House voted for the deal.

Apart from Sessions, incoming Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith of San Antonio supported the deal, as did fellow GOP Reps. Mac Thornberry of Clarendon and Kevin Brady of The Woodlands, incoming chairman of the Joint Economic Committee and a senior GOP member on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee.

Brady emphasizing that it reversed automatic tax hikes on 99 percent of Americans, while making permanent Bush-era tax cuts for millions of families and small businesses. He lauded provisions that end the threat of the Alternative Minimum Tax for 27 million taxpayers and protect many estates from taxation.

“The major overriding reason for passing this bill was to reverse the New Years Day tax hikes on Texas families and small businesses – and to once and for all make lower taxes a permanent reality for 99% of Americans,” Brady said. “From this day forward it will no longer take an act of Congress to keep Uncle Sam from taking more of your money.”

He noted the absolution granted via Twitter by Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform: “The Bush tax cuts lapsed at midnight last night. Every Republican voting for the Senate bill is cutting taxes and keeping his/her pledge.”

But that rationale wasn’t enough for most of their Texas Republican colleagues.

“It is an incredible outrage that this so-called compromise included virtually no spending cuts, only tax and spending hikes,” said Rep. John Carter, R-Round Rock.

Said Rep. Bill Flores, R-Bryan, a tea partier, “While I am pleased that many of the temporary income tax provisions passed in 2001 and 2003 were permanently extended… Congress still needs to address out of control spending.”